Creating a cascaded WMS connection

Now that we understand what service cascading is and some reasons why it might be useful to us, it is time to actually have a go at creating a cascaded service. For this example, we will set up a cascaded service to serve OpenStreetMap buildings to our clients.

Creating the data store

A cascaded WMS service is not really any different from other data sources that we might use with GeoServer. It still follows the same principle of having a data store connection and then publishing layers from the data store source. In this case, however, the data store is a connection to the external WMS server, and the layers we can publish are those advertised by WMS. Therefore, we must connect to the external WMS service in a way that will allow GeoServer to discover what layers can be published. To do this, we will utilize the external WMS server's published Capabilities document that will tell our GeoServer what layers are available. The link to the external WMS server...